I have never read of the human larynx changing position after birth nor
how it may contribute to SIDS.  Does anyone on Lactnet know of the
following as fact?

Judy Ritchie

 

In Bill Bryson’s 1990 book The Mother Tongue, English and How it Got
That Way, he writes on page 22 regarding Cro-Magnon people in this
paragraph:

 

And, unlike all previous hominids who roamed the earth, they could choke
on food.  That may seem a trifling point, but the slight evolutionary
change that pushed man’s larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made
choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of
sophisticated, well-articulated speech.

 

Other mammals have no contact between their airways and esophagi.  They
can breathe and swallow at the same time, and there is no possibility of
food going down the wrong way.  But with Homo sapiens food and drink
must pass over the larynx on the way to the gullet and thus there is a
constant risk that some will be inadvertently inhaled.  In modern
humans, the lowered larynx isn’t in position from birth.  It descends
sometime between the ages of three and five months, curiously the
precise period when babies are likely to suffer from Sudden Infant Death
Syndrome.  At all events the descended larynx explains why you can speak
and your dog cannot.


             ***********************************************

To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail
To start it again: set lactnet mail (or digest)
To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet
All commands go to [log in to unmask]

The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM)
mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html